Upon our next inevitable leaving,I will change my nameTo as yet unknown lettersIn a non-existent language,Denying what we leave behind,Drawing the letters from what we haveOn our backs,Forged from yetAnother star-less skyAnd burned into our souls here,Times own cryptography.All we were is spilled from the carts thatWe draw silently away,Along the streets with no sun.

Dareen Tatour’s “A Poet’s Hallucinations,” translated by Jonathan Wright, comes ahead of PEN America’s planned month of solidarity with Tatour, who was first arrested in October 2015, charged with incitement to violence primarily over a poem (translated to English here), and has been in jail and on house arrest since.

The verdict in Tatour’s trial is currently set for October 17 at noon in the Nazareth court. By this time, the poet will be exactly two years and a week in detention.

The solidarity event, according to a report in Arab48, included both poetry readings and a discussion of Tatour’s legal case by lawyers and activists. Tatour’s father was also there to thank those in attendance. According to multiple reports, both Regev and Kahlon threatened to use their power to defund the theatre in Yaffa that held the event.

Share this:

Like this:

As the wonderful Richard Söderberg said while he was on the Guldbagge awards, (Swedish Oscars) In order for women to take a step forward, men need to take a step back. It was a wonderful, true and very aware statement from one of Swedens coolest people. I thought about that statement, and about #metoo which he was, of course, referring too when I read this poem written by Syrian born Palestinian and now Stockholm resident poet Ghayath Almadhoun. It’s a beautiful poem of sadness and repentance for his part in the oppression of women everywhere, even in countries in which he has never set foot, in centuries long past and yet to come, for crimes against women he has never seen committed by men he has never met. If we are to grow past this oppression, men everywhere need to stand up and acknowledge their part in it, and take a step back so that women can take that so very important step forward.

‘Against barbarity,’ said the celebrated Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1942-2008), ‘poetry can resist only by cultivating an attachment to human frailty, like a blade of grass growing on a wall as armies march by.’

Spreading poetry around the world from places where words are feared is a very noble cause indeed. Words are amazing things, they can create, they can destroy, they can calm, they can anger, they are cherished and they are feared. They only way to end fear is to face it. Dictators always crush those who can use words, journalists, teachers, philosophers and especially poets whose words can cause souls to fly from a single blade of grass.

Smokestack Books is currently crowdfunding — through October 15 — for their forthcoming anthology A Blade of Grass: New Palestinian Poetry. Those pledging £20 or more will receive a copy of the book:

Designed by Belal Khaled.

By crowdfunding, the press seeks to raise money to help pay contributors’ fees and printing costs, as well as to donate to the legal campaigns of imprisoned poets Ashraf Fayadh and Dareen Tatour.

The title of the collection comes from a Mahmoud Darwish quote: “Against barbarity, poetry can resist only by cultivating an attachment to human frailty, like a blade of grass growing on a wall as armies march by.”

A Blade of Grass: New Palestinian Poetry will be a facing-page, meet-in-the-middle collection that brings together, in English and Arabic, new work by poets from historic Palestine and the diaspora, including work by Marwan Makhoul, Maya Abu Al-Hayyat, Fatena Al-Gharra, Dareen Tatour, Ashraf Fayadh, Fady Joudah, Naomi Shihab Nye, Deema K. Shehabi, Mustafa Abu Sneineh, Farid…

Like this:

He wasn’t perfect, but who is? The unrelenting commitment he gave to the cause of human rights, and the sacrifices he made for the struggle right up to the ultimate sacrifice, continue to inspire those who fight the corrupt system.

To quote the great poet Kenneth Rexroth from his beautiful poem For Eli Jacobson;

Ahhhh,, Allen G. It’s hard to think of a poet who had a bigger influence on me than you. Ezra, yes, perhaps once, tiger cage or not, Kenneth Rexroth and Kenneth Patchen both have opened my eyes to the beauty of taking on a social cause and of love, as has Neruda.

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, “

I was one of those angelheaded hipsters, I was one of the frustrated youth, busted without a reason, inclined towards the inevitable decline, ousted with nowhere to go and no way back in, climbing a ladder that I didn’t know didn’t even exist, where are the fucking steps? Where am I going? Following a hollow leader, leading nowhere but up and ending up nowhere but down, tearing my clothes in a flagellants rage, whipping my back with all the insipid uninspired rules of the military, the crucifix burnt into my skull, he is risen he is risen, Dylan, no, not Thomas, Bobby, no not Kennedy, a poet for no one but words for all, a hero running the streets at dawn, now, here in Stockholm luring me into a storm of calmness, denying me my rage until i couldn’t hold it anymore shooting it out into the worlds great gloryhole, with no one on the receiving end,

Well, I digress. Allen was simply one of the great minds of our, or any, generation. It is a pleasure to read and share his work. I’ve been planning on writing something for my 60th birthday a few weeks ago and I still hope to do that soon. It would be massively incomplete if it didn’t include this magnificent fountain, this famously censored HOWL.